Development has
always produced a bitter sweet and contradictory feeling in me. I always wanted
to work in the field because I felt that if I had to choose something to do
with my life I would rather choose something that would contribute to social
change or the improvement of people’s life. I finally happened to start working
with United Nations at the age of 23. Apart from the obvious links between
development and colonial and postcolonial tradition, I had never thought about
the different discourses of development. But there was a turn around when I
first got in contact with the theory.
Once I learnt
about the modernization, the dependency theory and most recently
“participatory” and “empowering” approaches to development, I started to see
development programming and practice with critical lenses. I started to link
that many development policies towards the Global South were biased and
constructed according to some principles that sometimes were not necessarily
inclined to contribute to social change or transformation. I also came to know
that the majority of the constructions of the Global South had been done by
people coming from the North, and that the development “apparatus” had
contributed to create knowledge to some extent to exercise power over the
“Third World” countries (Escobar, 1995). Through my experiences in Latin
America, I experienced first hand how the Global South has been fighting (most
of the times throughout bottom-up development initiatives and grassroots
movements) against these established constructions. Collectives and communities
started (de) constructing and (un) learning many of these notions of themselves
that were generated in the first place in the Global North. They were claiming
to build their own idea of development.
Now that I
have been engaging with and learning more about gender practice and academia, it
has been fascinating to see how the different gender theories are linked and
overlapping with the development ones. But why am I talking about my personal
experience and development discourse? What does all of this have to do with
gender and discourse? I wanted to connect my ideas about development, gender
discourse and my personal experience to deconstruct a gender campaign. During
this week I decided to put my critical lenses on and I’ve done formative
research. I’ve tried to analyze the GAD approach put in practice in the UN “HeForShe” campaign and see which gender discourse is associated
with it.
The campaign “HeForShe” was launched in September of 2014
and was lead by the UN-Women agency. This viral campaign aimed to mobilize men
and boys as principal advocates of change in the fight for gender inequality.
This campaign was especially in the spotlight because of Hollywood actress Emma
Watson, whose speech extended a “formal invitation” to men to participate in
the campaign. The leitmotiv of this campaign
was to “bring together one
half of humanity in support of the other half of humanity,” a statement through
which the UN campaign left the genderqueer community out of the humanity
equation. I believe this campaign illustrates how in the name of gender
equity, development agencies, international organizations and in general
(often gendered) institutions and structures tend to further ossify a binary
notion of gender that not only excludes the diverse range of non-binary
identities but also, in doing so, occludes the possibility of their
recognition.
I could recognize many
characteristics of the GAD approach in this campaign: holistic approach, the
rights-based approach and the “explicit integration of man and masculinities” (McIlwaine
& Datta, 2003), as my friend Mila already mentioned in her post.
Without undermining the
potential of the campaign neither the positive effects that these kinds of
campaigns have had in different parts of the world, my point here is about
discourse. About who is left out. In this regard, it is very important to
re-think heteronormativity (embedded in most development practices, discourse
and narratives) and to evaluate the heavy influence that heteronormativity has
in most of the feminist approaches that are used in the development field. Many
sexual subjectivities are left out within development discourse (and
consequently in the development policy framework). There is also an urge to
delink heterosexuality from Western traditional gender norms that privilege the
globalization of family values vs. other types of social organization
(considered as non-normative). In these realm GAD scholars, feminists and
development practitioners have a huge task in delinking notions of gender, sex
and sexuality in feminist analyses of development.
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